[PEN-TEST] War Dialers, Brute Force, etc.

[Vanja Hrustic <vanja () RELAYGROUP COM>]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Todd Beebe wrote:

> Toneloc is good for finding modems.  But, the value of the commercial
> products (both TeleSweep Secure and PhoneSweep) is the username/password
> guessing (read vulnerability testing).

Now that you mention this...

I wonder if there are any commercial tools that enable you to do
'extensive' (I don't know if this is the good word :) brute force against
remote systems? I'm not talking about "dial a modem and gues user/pass"
only. I'm talking about brute-force against various services (POP3,
telnet, etc.), finding valid users (finger, SMTP using expn or 'rcpt to:',
using '~username' on web servers, etc.), 'bouncing'...

For example:

During the test, you manage to get into a switch that was 'forgotten', and
you can use it to connect to systems behind the firewall (I'm not
inventing this, so no flames, please :).

Now, in order to do brute force, you *must* connect through that switch -
you can't connect directly. Are there any commercial tools that provide
'features' like this, where one needs to establish 1 or more sessions to
remote host(s) before actually running brute force?

Or, you dial into some terminal server (or whatever), and from there you
can connect to the remote system in order to perform brute-force.

Or, in there is badly configured proxy server that will let you connect to
'internal' systems using CONNECT (or GET), and from there you can start
brute force.

Simply, are there any tools that can take advantage of all the
'misconfigurations' on the remote network, or all the tools assume that
you will just brute-force the 1st system you connect to?

Also, how do all those 'commercial' (well, let's say "proprietary" - it
doesn't have to be commercial, but important thing is that you can't
modify it easily) tools determine what kind of dictionary they should use?
Does person who run the tool need to choose before the brute force starts,
or ... ? Tool chooses it based on banners maybe? I ask that for silly
reason - I've used to modify /bin/login (for fun only, long ago, but I
know that some people are still doing things like this :) so that when you
connect to the UNIX box and try to login, you'll see something like (and
hear a 'beep' as well ;):

Welcome to VAX/VMS 5.5 on node WHATEVER

Username: TEST
Password:
User authorization failure
Username:
etc...

What would 'automated' tool to in this case? (try to send CTRL+Z first? ;)

My (well, I should say "our" :) 'choice' for all brute-forcing tools is -
Perl (plus IO::Socket and few other modules, when/if needed). But again,
for me it's more important "what dictionary I'm using" than "what tool I'm
using":)

I wonder what other people are using :)

Thanks.

Vanja Hrustic
The Relay Group
http://relaygroup.com